Coordinating Your Advisor Team: CPA, Attorney, Wealth Manager
How to get your professional advisors working together instead of in silos. Who should quarterback advisor coordination for multi-entity families and complex financial operations.
Most families and business owners have a CPA, an attorney, and a wealth manager. The problem isn't the quality of individual advisors—it's that they're working in silos. Your CPA makes tax decisions without knowing your estate plan. Your attorney drafts documents without understanding your cash flow. Your wealth manager invests without knowing your business's capital needs.
The Quarterback Model
Someone needs to coordinate. In our experience, the most effective model has a financial controller or CFO serving as the quarterback—the person who understands the full picture and ensures all advisors are working from the same playbook.
This doesn't mean the quarterback replaces any advisor. It means they facilitate communication, ensure decisions are coordinated, and flag when one advisor's recommendation conflicts with another's strategy.
The Quarterly Coordination Cadence
At minimum, your advisor team should have a joint call or meeting quarterly. This meeting reviews: recent financial performance, upcoming decisions or events, tax planning updates, estate plan changes, and investment strategy alignment.
This single meeting often surfaces opportunities that no individual advisor would have identified working alone.
Key Takeaways
- Advisor silos create costly blind spots and conflicting strategies
- A financial quarterback ensures coordinated decision-making
- Quarterly joint advisor meetings surface cross-disciplinary opportunities
- The quarterback role is ideal for a fractional CFO or controller
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Talk with Aligned Ledger about where you are today and what the right next move looks like for your finance function.
Aligned Ledger is not a CPA firm and does not provide tax, audit, or attest services.
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